Why
I Left Islam

by Khaled
Batarfi

07 Apr, 2006

I was born in a moderate Shiite family
in Punjab, eastern
province of
Pakistan. As it happens with almost every other Muslim male newborn, I
underwent unscientific rituals based on religious traditions
carried out on me, including Azaan in my ears on the very first
day followed by circumcision and head shaving in the first week of
my life. Both my grand mothers were very devout Shiites and
Muslims, as we live in Pakistan in a closely knit family so the
process of my brain washing started early by telling me about the
greatness of Allah, the exalted morality of Prophet and all 12
Imams and the great sacrifice of Imam Hussain and his family to
save Islam from falling into evil hands. A Shiite cleric was hired
to teach me the recitation of the Quran and also Islamic and
Shiite fundamentals who tried his best to instil in me the
reverence to faith in Islam and Shiite sect in particular. At the
age of ten I finished the recitation of the Quran twice and was
done with the Cleric. I happened to watch "The Message" movie when
I was about 8 and as Islam was depicted very positively in this
Hollywood style scripted movie it
left on me a positive impression of Islam.

Every year I used to go, with my mother and siblings, to attend
Muharram rituals. The place where I went had a silver metallic
imposter "Taziyah" of Imam Hussain's shrine. People used
to gather there for commemorating the deaths of the Imam and their
family and for meeting up those relatives they only meet once
a year. There were too many odd rituals happening there. Significant
of those rituals included a horse 'Zuljanah' dressed as
Imam's horse coming in a courtyard housing the "Taziyah"
and people holding their young ones moved these infants under
the belly of the "sacred" horse, while other grown ups tried
their best to be the first to touch the horse, so as not to miss
out on the blessings coming from heaven in form of the horse.
The
other event which I never liked to watch was a display of masochism
and in some cases sadism. This event called "Zanjir Zani"
where people used to hit their backs with a set of long blades
to go out of the way to prove that they stand nearer and higher
in terms of religious piety and feel the tragedy more by hurting
themselves. In the same event some of the sadistic people coerced
and coaxed their young children who are not mature enough to decide
for themselves (at the age of five) to start practicing this insane
ritual. After seeing this appalling ritual I started questioning
the validity of such sickening practices. That was the first time
I questioned anything about my religion.

Time went on and the brain washing process continued in the
school. This was done in many ways. I'll mention a few of those
here. Islamic studies were made a mandatory subject by the corrupt
and dictatorial Zia regime. Young children minds including myself
were therefore infected by presenting them with a heavily biased
picture of utopian Islam and its perfect and exemplary Prophet and
his followers. Also some of the more conservative teachers tried
their best to instill hatred against the Jews and all infidels
while glorifying the acts of Muslim warriors. Some of them gave
incentives to students if they had offered morning prayers. In the
month of fasting, people who weren't fasting were embarrassed by
their fellow students and teachers and the ones who fasted were
highly praised. It was told by some of the teachers that Imam
Ali's best fasting days were the hottest and longest. Also some of
the fabricated hadith were also used to show how progressive Islam
was e.g. "Seek knowledge even if you have to go to
China
" etc. So this kind of environment was prevalent in our school.

The major balancing force in this entire one sided world of Islam
was my father. He had an opportunity to go to US to get his MS
degree and during his time he was able to understand the western
values and why some of those values should be used to bring up his
children. He himself was not a very devout Muslim but still went
to the two Eid prayers and participated fully in the last 3 days
of Ashura (8-10th of Muharram). So I was never forced to say
prayers or asked to go to mosque nor do any religious activity. I
fasted and prayed on my own will, thanks to the brain washing done
for a quarter century. During this time I felt the plight of women
in the country, how they are superficially respected but actually
have no real rights on their own i.e. they can't take divorce by
themselves as men do. They can't prove rape. They can't do
anything if a man marries another woman. They get less in
inheritance and they are considered imbecile by the Islamic law to
have half the witness of a man no matter how much more educated
they are compared to the male witness. I always thought if I were
born a girl i.e. had an X chromosome in my DNA rather than Y it
would have sealed my fate for ever and that didn't seem to me to
be any justice. I also thought about the paradox of free will and
determination and both of them lead to the conclusion that God
cannot be omniscient and if God is omniscient and can predict our
every future move then we are just dummies as we'll be doing what
God already knows and that means he had decided to put people in
heaven and hell right from their birth.

With these questions still unanswered in my mind I left Pakistan
and came to US to do my MS. Luckily I got the privilege to be at a
premier institution, so I was able to make some friends from my
country with whom I can have open intellectual discussions about
these issues. Also I got more awareness about the Taliban and
their cruel regime and the problems Afghan women are facing there.
I thought at that point of time that Taliban are not following
true Islam and they have invented their own version of Islam to
take control of the war battered region. So when Taliban smashed
Bamiyan Buddha statue I was shocked at the barbarism of these
Taliban and it encouraged me to do more research on Islam. Then
9/11 came and I was so distressed at the insanity of these so
called martyrs. These incidents filled me with grief and shame as
I thought that people who have the same religion as mine are doing
all these horrendous acts in the name of religion.

The first major blow that shattered my faith was when I got to
know about the slavery of women, men and children and how women
slaves were treated and what happened to the women of neighboring
non Muslim countries. So after doing more research I got definite
proof from the Islamic sources that slavery was prevalent and
practiced by early Muslims. I tried to read the explanations given
by the apologists but none of them satisfied me. I always held
human and especially women rights in high esteem and slavery of
women seem to me as an extreme violation of those rights and I
thought that no divine religion can do that. So to satisfy myself
I came to the conclusion that these haditha written after more
than 2 centuries must be corrupted so I thought I should only
consider Islam based on the Quran rather than these hadiths.

Two years back I read Bertrand Russell's essays on religion and
those opened my eyes. Being disgusted by the human rights in Islam
I instantly moved away from Islam and stopped praying and fasting
and due to my lack of Quranic knowledge I postponed the religious
matters to be considered later when I have some time available for
myself to seek the truth about it.

The final tipping point came about six months ago when I watched
the movie Alexander. I just thought to look up the real history of
Alexander and then some how came to know about the information in
Wikipedia and an article in FFI site. I was deeply shocked and
angered to know that Quranic verse on Alexander is borrowed from
Alexander's Romance and also that Quran considered Earth flat due
to misconception of Greeks during that time. Once I saw FFI
website I kept on reading the articles and found them highly
logical and authentic, while the arguments presented by the
apologists were full of fallacies that carry no weight. I felt a
lot of anger for being made a fool by the society around me for so
many years. I still feel lucky that I got out of this "black hole"
as most of the people are incapable of doing that.

I was feeling a strong urge to write my testimonial for quite some
time so I finally sat down today to accomplish this task to let
others know if they are still following Islam, how much darkness
they are in. I personally want to thank Mr. Ali Sina and all the
authors who have written articles for FFI as they are spending
their precious time for a very noble cause of enlightening people
and showing them the correct path. Now I'm of the opinion that
everything that was shown as a good aspect of Islam to me can be
countered by egregiously bad deeds done by the Prophet and his
partners, which tells me how much hypocrisy is present in the
Islamic teachings.